Talking about design & implementation of solutions using modern OSS frameworks, tools, open standards and cutting-edge technology

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

What are the size of Ubuntu and Debian repositories?

Before mirroring a complete Ubuntu / Debian repository on your hard drive, you want for sure have an estimation of the "weight" of all packages.

This script computes the total size of various Debian-based repositories by means of downloading the Packages.gz and making a sum of the size of every package. Of course, there are many shared packages between different versions of the same Linux distro. So this script will compute the max possible size.

Of course, you are probably right, the script doesn't consider the packages shared among the different versions (lucid, maverick, natty, oneiric and precise) and architectures (i386, amd64, etc). Hence the greater size, you can use it to compute the max possible size (an upper bound) without the need of a full download. I'll improve it later to considering such issue.